About

NevOnNevOn is the archive weblog of Neville Hobson, a British business communicator based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, a record of commentary and conversations from December 2002 until 22 February 2006. This site is no longer updated - please visit www.nevillehobson.com.

If you subscribe to the NevOn FeedBurner RSS feed, your subscription should continue seamlessly for the new blog. If you subscibe via any other means, you'll need to manually update your subscription. Here the link to the new feed:

I'll be doing some housekeeping and tidying-up here during the coming days as I continue afresh at the new place. Look forward to seeing you there!

[Update 22 March] A little bit of reorganizing here. Main thing - changed commenting to require TypeKey sign-in first. Why? It's the only way I can think of to try and stop the constant stream of spam I see in the comment moderation queue. As TypePad doesn't let me switch off commenting for archive posts except manually per post - site-wide switch-off is not an option: imagine having to manually change each of nearly 1,500 posts - this is the next-best thing. Can't do much about spam trackbacks to archives, though.

Links for the.blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the home page for info.

If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, email us at fircomments@gmail.com, or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We'll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I've been experimenting with the Movable Type and WordPress blog platforms since last August, with a move to a new blog the planned conclusion of that experimenting.

It's taken longer than I originally planned, but I'm just about ready to make the switch to a new blog.

So during this week, I will be starting afresh with a new domain and a new home - www.nevillehobson.com. The new blog (running on the latest WordPress release) is live now but I'm not yet writing there full-time.

When I do make the switch, this blog, NevOn, will no longer be updated and instead will become the historical archive of my blogging and conversations here since July 2004.

If you currently subscribe to the FeedBurner RSS feed for this blog, your subscription should seamlessly continue with the new RSS feed for the new blog. If I've figured out FB's instructions correctly ;)

More comment in the "goodbye/hello" post I'll write here at the time of the switch.

19 February 2006

Listening this morning to a BBC World Service radio interview with Peter Robertson, vice-chairman of the Chevron oil company, I was struck in particular by his commentary about a website where the public can join Chevron in an online discussion about the future of energy.

Overall, I found it a fascinating interview, with its discussion of wide-ranging topics including the future of energy, the evolving role of the energy industry (the oil companies) and corporate social responsibility. From a PR point of view, I think Robertson did a pretty good job for his company.

Concerning the online discussion, Robertson was talking about willyoujoinus.com, a website sponsored by Chevron, that's facilitating some discussion about the future of energy and what people think about it.

The willyoujoinus.com discussion forum was created as a place for individuals and groups to exchange ideas on important energy issues. It is also a place for users to read, consider, respond, and perhaps be inspired to take individual or collective action in an environment of mutual respect.

To contribute your opinions, you have to register. And your comments are moderated:

Experienced outside moderators have been assigned to ensure that postings are relevant and appropriate, and otherwise meet the site’s community guidelines as described below.

All postings will be reviewed by moderators and published on the site within 24 hours if determined to be within these guidelines.

That's fine - comment moderation is hardly unheard of and, as long as the policy is clearly stated, unlikely to confuse participants nor set any wrong expectations.

The concept of this effort by Chevron - provide a place online where people can participate in broadly open discussion on a topical issue - is very good, precisely the kind of thing where a blog could work well as that place for open, even if moderated, discussion.

But willyoujoinus.com is not a blog. Instead it's a beautifully-designed and clearly well thought through corporate website with some blog-like naming (the words 'post' and 'comment' are used, for instance).

It's gatekeeper heaven, too, with its completely un-blog-like methodology of contributing your opinions via a web form that goes off to some unknown person or group of moderators - what Chevron describes as "experienced outside moderators" (without giving a sense of who these people are: could be the PR agency for all I know) and, elsewhere in the site, as "contracted specialists in community moderation" (sounds scary!).

Imagine if Chevron had used a blog instead. With RSS feeds. With trackback capability. It could certainly still require registration and login in order for anyone to participate, and have comment moderation.

Most important, though, a blog could give this place personality and authenticity - two of the attributes which it currently and starkly lacks. And identify who the moderators are. Build some trust.

You're about 80 percent there with this, Chevron. Why not go the full 100? Put your pedal to the metal!

Links for the.blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the home page for info.

If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, email us at fircomments@gmail.com, or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We'll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Links for the.blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the home page for info.

If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, email us at fircomments@gmail.com, or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We'll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Another indicator of how some mainstream media see podcasting as a big opportunity - The Daily Telegraph is advertising for two Podcast Reporters/Producers:

[...] We are looking for two individuals who are capable of creating high quality and engaging Podcasts that feature comment and opinion from both internal and external sources. The successful candidates will be expected to write, voice, edit and upload audio content. A proven track record in journalism is essential. Full training will be provided on the technical aspects of the role.

If you've been a follower of Marc Orchant's insightful commentaries over at The Office Weblog about all things to do with office productivity, cool tools, gadgets and Microsoft Office, note that he's moved house.

From the beginning of February, Marc's now blogging at ZDNet with the new Office Evolution blog. Sign up for the RSS feed here.

(I had an email from Marc ahead of his move and I meant to post about this last week. Better late than never...)

[...] Blogs stand to benefit in the present media landscape for a number of reasons:

Because of the overload of information it is impossible for people to keep up with all of it. Information needs to be sifted through and made sense of.

Bloggers also add richness to the already established reach of mass media.

Blogs can cater to niche audiences that mass media cannot because mass media must focus on the most important or biggest issues at hand.

Because of the Internet a blogger can have a niche audience of 5,000 readers a day from around the world.

A major factor is that blogs have little to no overhead to set up and run. All that is needed is a computer and an Internet connection and a blogger can be up and running, so the distribution costs are cheap.

Bloggers can be vicious but they can also help companies avert disaster, says the sub-title as The Economist devotes 10 paragraphs of its 14-paragraph article discussing the negative aspect of blogs and the potential reputation and other damage that a company can suffer at the hands of bloggers.

One reality point, I suppose, is that the article positions blogs among other long-standing social media like online discussion groups (aka forums or chat rooms) and email lists that have been around for years, so a reader of this article would hopefully not form an impression that blogs are just some form of unique evil manifestation of the worst in people.

And there's the rub for me. Yet another article in a mainstream medium where the overall feeling you have after reading it is that blogs and other online communication media are something mostly to be feared and concerned about, so you'd better get your crisis communication plan ready (as the article concludes) for a disaster.

Yes, get your crisis plan ready but not just because, suddenly, there seem to be blogs out there written by bloggers determined only to do you damage!

Let's say you have your crisis communication plan ready to roll so that you are prepared for any eventuality. And that eventuality doesn't necessarily mean a negative thing - the ability to respond quickly and decisively isn't always to do with the negative use of the word 'crisis.'

What's different today - and this is the real point - is that blogs and other new social media (eg, podcasts) should also be factors you will consider and take into account in your crisis communication planning. Not only from the point of view of what such media are saying about your company, your brand, etc, but also how you can make use of such media.